This paper argues that mainstream media has a direct influence on what we perceive as ethical food, and thus, good to eat. The focus of this paper is on the media’s portrayal of farm animals and its effect on consumption rather than other ways that the media influences us, such as fast-food advertisements and how they affect our view of what is healthy and what we should be eating. Therefore, the use of the term “ethical” in this paper refers to methods of obtaining food in which animals are caused no suffering.
The media often covers only a small subset of farm animals and shows how they have been mistreated. This unequal coverage of various animals has affected the way we view which foods are ethical to consume. In addition, this paper goes into detail about the relationship between big agricultural corporations and the media and how this affects the coverage of farm animals. The media’s grotesquely inaccurate portrayal of farm life first affects us when we are toddlers.
Nearly every child has heard the nursery rhyme “Old MacDonald Had a Farm,” whose lyrics and accompanying picture book paint a pretty picture of what farm life is like to children. A sweet, loving, and caring old man looks after all his farm animals as if they were his own children. “The farm is small and picturesque, the farmer and his wife love their animals and carefully tend their crops, and they all live happily ever after”. This is the image most people have of farm life throughout their entire lives, and when they think about where the meat that they buy comes from, they often think of farms like this.
However, this is far from accurate. The vast majority of the meat that people buy from supermarkets and fast-food chains comes from what are known as factory farms. Many small or “family” farmers have been forced out of business because they simply cannot compete with large, corporate, “factory” farms. In contrast with idealistic “Old MacDonald”-type farms, factory farm animals spend all their lives indoors with large numbers of others, where their freedom of movement and opportunity to perform natural behavior are severely limited.
Corporate farmers have lots of freedom due to minimal government regulations, and they are interested in continuing the mythical “Old MacDonald”-style farms so that they do not have to deal with public outcry and possible government regulation. Behind these mythological images that corporate farmers create in the public’s mind lies great suffering of factory farm animals. Of the animals that Americans eat, virtually all of them suffer unnecessarily. According to the U. S. Department of Agriculture, in 2015, over nine billion land animals were slaughtered for food.
According to Mercy for Animals, thirtythree million cows, 113 million pigs, 250 million turkeys, and nine billion broiler chickens are slaughtered each year. Some common practices on factory farms include debeaking chickens and cutting off the tails of cows and piglets, which supposedly increase efficiency and safety as well as cause discomfort, pain, and stress for the animals. Research conducted by USDA Agricultural Research Service immunologist Susan Eicher and neuroscientist Heng-wei Cheng show that behavioral and physiological signs suggest that this practice “can cause lasting pain”.
Chickens are packed into wire cages about the size of a standard sheet of typing paper, which is so small that they cannot extend even one wing. Mercy for Animals’ undercover investigators exposed the truth to what happens in these factory farms. One undercover activist recalled, “I’ve seen guys punch cows, stick cattle prods in their eyes, bragging, ‘I got her in the eyeball! “. Ph. D. and world-renowned animal behaviorist Jonathan Balcombe describes, “The conditions I witnessed … re tragic and deeply disturbing. Baby animals have been taken from their mothers and subjected to a world without love, nurturing, or sympathy. Instead they are treated coldly and brutally until they die of neglect or malnutrition, or perhaps chronic misery”.
Other undercover investigators who witnessed hundreds of acts of cruelty describe workers “pulling chickens apart, stomping on them, beating them, running over them on purpose with a fork-lift truck, and even blowing them up with dry ice ‘bombs. … Workers had ripped off a bird’s head to write graffiti in blood, plucked feathers off live chickens to ‘make it snow,’ suffocated a chicken by tying a latex glove over its head, and squeezed birds like water balloons to spray feces over other birds”. Furthermore, sows are confined to crates meas ng six feet long and two feet wide, which is barely large enough for their bodies. They can only stand up, lie down, or nurse their piglets, and are unable to turn around or do basically anything else.
Certainly, this list of cruel and unnecessary acts to farm animals is not exhaustive; countless more similar stories exist, but hopefully the extent to which these animals have suffered is clear. When the media covers terrible instances of farm animal suffering like those discussed above, how does the public respond to these events? Dena Jones found that when animal protection groups used paid advertisements targeted to the general public, the depiction of animal suffering was an especially effective method for motivating audience action on behalf of animals .
Techniques which call into question the core of human perceptions of animals offer greater potential for elevating animal status by making it more difficult for society to resume business as usual”. Unfortunately, most activist groups cannot afford to advertise and must rely on getting unpaid publicity through the news media due to a limited budget. Sociologist Corwin Kruse did a content analysis of national TV and magazine news coverage of vivisection from 1984 to 1993 and found that “the news media granted less political standing to animal activists than vivisectors and usually framed animal activism events in a negative way”.
In George Gerbner’s Cultural Indicators Research Project, he found that television represents animals as “mostly violent” and “deserving of victimization”. Peter Simonson explains that PETA’s increasing and successful use of celebrity endorsements suggests that the news media are less receptive to promoting pro-animal frames than the music and entertainment industry. A survey of the Australian public was undertaken to investigate their reactions and responses to animal cruelty in the media.
It was found that the most common reaction was feeling pity for the cattle, and women were more likely than men to feel sad or angry. In addition, most people discussed the media coverage with others afterwards but fewer than ten percent contacted politicians or wrote to newspapers, which suggests that the media’s exposure of animal cruelty does not significantly change people’s behavior. For the most part, this is generally the case since some people know that farm animal cruelty exists but still eat the meat anyway.
However, there is one case that I have discovered that seems to differ from this norm. A significant number of Americans, including my family, see veal as unethical to eat, most likely because the idea of torturing a baby cow for its meat is difficult to imagine without emotion. A case study in the book The Ethics of What We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter describes a family in which Jake, a mother of two, refuses to eat meat. She says, ‘Veal was definitely out, without question.
I mean, it was so well covered in the media, how the calves could barely move. Eating it just didn’t seem worth it for the cost to the animals … and the horror” . Yet, other animals are deemed more ethical to eat even though they are treated just as bad, if not worse than, calves because the suffering of cows is covered by the media more than other farm animals, the meat of other animals is less expensive than veal, or perhaps “we’re told by dieticians to choose chicken over red meat, for health reasons,” as Jake mentions.
In any case, the preference of the media to cover calves over other animals is clearly seen here, probably because baby cows are seen as innocent and undeserving of any such torture, and babies are considered more defenseless than their adult counterparts. It is obvious to see that the media portrays the consumption of eating baby calves as unethical, and as a result, it has prompted a large number of Americans to cease eating it. Next, we take a broader look at how food advertising and marketing affects our food choices and what we think is good, ethical food.